Burns back on ‘Ticket’; more local hours on KTKR schedule

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there might not be any second acts in American life, but there are in local sports radio.

Example: S.A. host Peter Burns was axed by Clear Channel radio, losing his sales job there as well as the thing he most loved, his on-air gig on AM sports station Ticket 760. Now, he’s getting a second chance with that very show he had to let go.

“Morning Drive with Andy Everett and Peter Burns” – from 7 to 9 a.m. returns Monday. It’s part of a reworking of KTKR-AM’s weekday schedule to make room for an impressive seven hours of local sports programming.

More on that later. Back to Burns. . .So, what happened in between his boot in January and this month’s comeback?

“I let them know I was interested in coming back on air and a couple weeks later, they offered me this job,” Burns said.

Also, he had a chance to look around during those two months unemployed, and Burns already had gotten a taste of what else was available out there. And it wasn’t all that appealing.

He found a sales opportunity at a “Ticket” station in Dallas – the new home of his girlfriend, foxy former WOAI reporter Kim Fischer – but there was no on-air job attached.

Then, there was a sales/weekend gig in Denver, but Burns just couldn’t let go of his love for San Antonio and fondness for the radio job here he was forced to give up.

He especially loved the friendly feedback he’d get from listeners when he’d go to a club or movie theater. “San Antonio is a big city, but it still has that small-town way about it.”

From Clear Channel’s point of view, they also may have seen the hefty support he got from listeners via the media, Facebook and Twitter and decided to give Burns another chance.

However, he was hired back not in a sales position – which got him in hot water before – but as part-time on-air talent.

He’ll still be involved in sales; he describes his gig as “profit-sharing,” meaning Burns and Andy are expected to find sponsors for their “Morning Drive” gig and KTKR will share the profits — an M.O. radio stations are adopting more and more during this shaky economy.

Which brings me back to the big announcement that “The Ticket” has been touting all over its airwaves today: Its weekday schedule has been revised to make room for an extra hour of local programming.

“People loved our shows but wanted to hear more about San Antonio sports – or have a better chance to hear San Antonio sports perspective about the big national stories,” Peter Bolger, director of AM operations for Clear Channel-San Antonio, wrote in a message. “But we wouldn’t have been able to do this if we didn’t have the talent available. I don’t think anyone else is able to do what we are doing: seven hours of prime time sports talk programming every weekday devoted to the San Antonio perspective of local, regional and naional sports.”

What the new lineup amounts to is two daytime hours – an hour more than what’s currently airing at night — of “The Sports Grind,” anchored by Calvin Casey, and the repositioning of flagship “Sports Talk San Antonio” with Mike Taylor. It now will air 4 to 7 p.m., enabling Taylor to do, as Bolger put it, “Spurs related programming right up to the start of the network broadcast on WOAI.”